Practitioner Profile

Cher’s areas of specialization include:
* Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
* Global Developmental Delay (GDD)
* Down’s Syndrome (DS)
* Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
* Intellectual disability (ID)
* Selective mutism
* Articulation and Phonological Disorders

As a Speech Therapist who is highly particular about the quality of support she provides to her clients and their caregivers, Cher Poh Gaik (Cher) adopts a systematic, organized and analytical approach to her intervention programmes. Always seeking to help her clients to the best of her ability, Cher is constantly working on enhancing her problem-solving skills, especially in improving the efficacy of her intervention to help a child achieve the best therapy outcomes. With her background in Education, Linguistics and English Studies to support her speech-language therapy training, she takes a special interest in the speech, language and communication skills of children under her care. Having worked in one-to-one clinic settings, special needs schools as well as EIPIC centres in Singapore, Cher had good exposure as a centre-based and school-based therapist. This gave her the opportunity to work closely with teachers and caregivers to provide the child with a holistic intervention approach. Her work experience covers individual, dyad and small-group intervention. She strongly believes in providing children with learning opportunities within fun, stress-free environments and utilises strategies from other professionals she has worked with in multi and transdisciplinary therapy settings. To further ensure learning is a positive experience, she uses tasks which are customised to each child’s interests and strengths, providing as much support as is required until the child can independently use the skill being targeted. Over the years, Cher has also developed a passion for coaching and counselling caregivers of children with learning needs as she believes that robust caregiver education is key to optimising the child’s therapy progress. Among the areas which she has received additional training in are: DIR Floortime, PROMPT, Hanen More Than Words, PECS, management of anxiety difficulties in children and methods in structured teaching and Lidcombe.